If you are in reception or customer services positions you’ll most likely be one of the first people that clients will speak with when they make contact with your company. You won’t need a deep understanding about the products and services the business provide because they’ll be managed by the sales executives or product specialists but you will need to help customers with a broad range of basic information.

Product and Service Packaging & Prices

Understand the current products and services and explain a bit about what they mean. You need to know what is on your business website so that you can direct customers to relevant pages to answer their questions. When a customer wants more specific information or a customisation based on their own personal situation you need to know who to refer customers to.

Understand the organisational chart and who to send inquiries to when more information is required. This can involve the use of a

• CloudPBX phone system,
• online website chat,
• customer service ticketing system or
• email system.

Understand how to perform market research to find out what competitors are doing and reporting this information to business managers so that they can improve the marketing for your own businesses. Provide input based on client contact about features clients are looking for and how they can fit in or add to existing products and services.

Landing Pages, Offers and Call-to-action

Your business website is designed to be appealing to the people who need your products and services so you need to know it well. If you are providing customer service via website chat it is important to be able to share important website links quickly.

Know which website landing pages provide information that customers want and design reasons for your customers to enter their details into forms for special offers and more detailed information. Lead capture is an important part of the process of marketing and sales and by encouraging clients to participate will help the marketing and sales manager get better results.

When you and your organisation do a good job with website lead capture for special offers and promotions you can reduce your workload and enable other team members do their job better.

Digital Advertising and Handling Inbound Enquiries

Businesses spend money promoting their products and services using Google Ads, Facebook, Gumtree and their own website and these ads contain offers and claims that appeal to potential customers. One of the tasks of a receptionist and online Customer Service team member is to know what questions to ask a prospect so you can recommend a product or solution.

You should know about:

• Features and purpose of digital ads,
• Expectation of call-to-actions,
• Understand what an “ideal customer” looks like
• How to begin a Customer Service engagement with a prospect

Sometimes your role might involve qualifying prospective customers to find out exactly which product or service they need. In this scenario your manage should provide a list of questions and what an ideal client looks like. A well organised receptionist can also help refer prospects to other organisations if a prospect is not ideal.

Learn how to find and get ideal clients

Digital Skills to Communicate and Engage

You’ll need to know how to use online tools to:

• See all the visitors at a website and understand what they are doing
• Learn how to use website chat to engage with website visitors
• How to manage expectations and keep visitors informed
• Clarify the customers needs, budget and timeframe
• Use a messaging system to engage with website visitors after the chat
• Understand the stages of the buying journey and sales pipeline
• Tools used by Support Administrators to ensure good quality customer service
• Send and receive emails and schedule appointments

Back to Office Admin and Business Admin Jobs